Victor Davis Hanson

Democratic candidates are running a race of inauthenticity

Victor Davis Hanson July 11, 2019

An epidemic of false identities, massaged résumés and warped ancestries has broken out among the current Democratic presidential primary candidates.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for years claimed Native American ancestry. An embattled Warren ironically took a DNA test that only proved her critics’ contention that she was no more of Native American heritage than the vast majority of Americans.

Another Democratic candidate, Robert Francis O’Rourke, is a rich white male who grew up in affluence. O’Rourke some time ago adopted the name “Beto,” an abbreviation for the Spanish “Roberto.” The Spanish-speaking, Irish-American O’Rourke, with a wink and nod, has assumed a useful near-Latino identity.

That ruse became a caricature in O’Rourke’s 2018 race for the Texas Senate. The second-generation Cuban-American incumbent, Sen. Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz, was portrayed by the media as the non-Spanish-speaking “white guy” pitted against the more authentic Irish-American Latino “Beto.”

Few would know that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was actually born with the alliterative European name Warren Wilhelm Jr. With today’s politically correct calibrations of avoiding Northern European nomenclature, the Latinate “de Blasio” apparently ranks higher than the overtly German “Wilhelm.”

It has long been a populist tradition that presidential candidates downplay their financial success or even fabricate a “born in a log cabin” myth of early poverty and adversity. But recently, Democratic candidates have taken that trope to identity-politics extremes.

Former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro emphasizes his common-man Latino roots. But Castro never spoke fluent Spanish. Castro’s parents were solidly middle-class, and he took Latin and Japanese in school.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) often poses as a spokesman for the African American inner-city and is hoping to gain the nomination on the strength of his minority bona fides. But Booker grew up in the affluent and nearly all-white suburbs of New Jersey, the child of two IBM executives who sent him to Stanford, after which he became a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) attacked former Vice President Joe Biden in a recent debate by claiming that his opposition some 40 years ago to court-mandated busing had endangered her own chance at a good primary-school education. Perhaps. But the city of Berkeley, where Harris briefly lived in as a child before migrating to Canada, was well-integrated. A local school district, not a federal court, instituted the busing program she joined. Both of her parents have Ph.D.s, one a former Stanford professor, the other a scientist who often flew the young Harris to India to visit relatives.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) is running again as an unapologetic socialist, waging rhetorical class warfare against the haves on behalf of the have-nots. But while Sanders was often underemployed in his earlier years, after a lifetime of public office he is now a millionaire. He reportedly owns three homes and earned nearly $1 million from book royalties in both 2016 and 2017.

All of these candidates are running hard against President Donald Trump, the assumed wealthier, whiter and more toxic male in the White House.

Trump may be many things, and he may exaggerate data and fudge facts. But he at least seems authentically Trump. He does not claim to be a poor victim, but instead brags on, or even exaggerates, his billions.

Trump does not downplay his politically incorrect Scottish and German background. Instead, he often emphasizes both to the point of overstatement.

He always appears with his customary comb-over hair, orange tan, long tie and suit, and he speaks in the same Queens accent whether he is talking to Alabama farmers, West Virginia miners or Michigan auto workers.

In contrast, Trump’s Democratic rivals do not seem especially forthcoming about who they are. When convenient, they play down their advanced degrees, the success of their parents, their own advantaged upbringings, successful assimilation and stereotypically bourgeois lives. And based on their attacks on front-runner Biden, they seem to want to distance themselves from anyone upper-middle-class, white, male, heterosexual, Christian or old.

Yet at this late date in the American republic, it is hard to find middle-aged presidential candidates without successful business or political backgrounds, much less any who were or are poor — or who are victimized women or ostracized minorities.

No matter. The mantra of the new progressive movement is that racism, misogyny and class oppression are everywhere — and that no one is better acquainted with such endemic hatred than upscale Democratic candidates, who have supposedly lived through such ordeals.

No wonder such fantasies so often result in farce.

(Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the soon-to-be released “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” to appear in October from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.)

About Victor Davis Hanson

An author, editor and professor, Victor David Hanson’s world-affairs column bridges the gap between xenophobia and indifference. Hanson, who received his doctorate in classics from Stanford University, attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and graduated with highest honors from the University of California Santa Cruz.

Hanson has more than 350 articles and 16 books to his credit, including “Warfare and Agriculture,” “The Western Way of War” and “Fields Without Dreams.” His book “Land Was Everything” was a Pen semi-finalist in 2000, and “Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power” appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List. In 2002, Hanson received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism. Hanson’s “A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War” was named one of the New York Time’s 100 most notable books of 2005.

He is a professor of classics emeritus at California State University, a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University and a fellow of Hillsdale College. Hanson won an American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 1991 and received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Center for Behavioral Sciences the following year.

Hanson is a contributing editor to Arion, the Military History Quarterly and City Journal. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph, among others. He has been interviewed on National Public Radio and has appeared on the news hours of PBS, MSNBC and Fox.

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